i never really understood the term “irreconcilable differences” until last week. whenever someone used that term to explain to me why they were divorced, i would just think to myself, “differences aren’t irreconcilable. differences are what make a marriage interesting.” but now i think i understand that some differences are irreconcilable...

we need a new mattress.we have needed one for quite a while. ours is almost 20 years old. adam kept swearing that they lasted 20 or even 30 years and i kept swearing that i wasn’t sleeping well. and i made him google the mattress question (how long one lasted) and on this one issue I WAS RIGHT!!!!! (can i have an AMEN?) and he began to notice that he wasn’t sleeping that well and then we took the mattress cover off one day and the mattress resembled a mountain range with peaks and valleys.

so finally this weekend we went mattress shopping. thus the irreconcilable differences...

adam would like to sleep on a wooden board. in fact at one point in our search he called me over to try out a wonderful mattress that he had discovered. i hated to tell him that he was lying on the store’s desk. okay so that was a slight exaggeration. but the mattress that he LOVED felt exactly like lying on a desk. and i don’t want to sleep on a desk. repeat after me “a desk is not the best for rest”.

i want to lie on a fluffy marshmallow cloud. those were the mattresses i liked. the fluffy marshmallow cloud section. i almost took a really good nap in the fluffy marshmallow cloud section in one store.

we went to three stores. we tried EVERY mattress that one could purchase in this city.

and as we kept on loving different mattresses, i kept talking about how we could ricky and lucy ricardo it and purchase twin beds. one board like and one fluffy cloud.

i can’t even remember picking out our first mattress. adam says he went to sam’s club and bought the cheapest mattress they had right before our wedding and set it up in our new house and that i wasn’t with him when he bought it. he never ever tried it out until it was set up in our tiny bedroom. we were in our early 20’s, he was moving from a water bed to a real mattress so any mattress was a good mattress for him and much firmer than his water bed. and i was young and starry eyed and too busy to worry with a mundane mattress purchase- I HAD A WEDDING TO PLAN. and wasn’t it MORE Important to pick out the flower arrangements on the table that would last for the 2 hours of the reception than the mattress i would sleep on for hopefully 8 hours and night for the next 20 years?

of course i didn’t realize that a mattress purchase with adam was a lifetime commitment (which he informs me now it ISN’T a lifetime commitment because we ARE talking about getting a new one and we aren’t dead yet.) so that is why this next mattress (which will take me into my senior years is a bit more important to me. i have learned to care about my sleep (as i type this up at 1:30 a.m. because i can’t sleep on that sagging mattress again).

and after we had tried all those new mattresses, we came home and tried our mattress and it became crystal clear to adam that ours had seen its glory days. even he had to agree that 19 years was enough for one mattress.

and i think that i suggested the ricky and lucy thing one too many times to adam in the days since our little mattress shopping expedition because he informed me tonight that a new mattress will arrive in the morning. it is a SUPER FIRM with a little thin layer of marshmallow cloud over the top of it.

it is not the fluffy cloud one that i loved (which of course was THE MOST expensive one) and it is not the ALMOST LIKE SLEEPING ON A ROCK one that he loved (which was of course the LEAST expensive one). it is one that i did like second best. and he got a really good price on it (so that should make him sleep better at night).

some differences are irreconcilable and yet you just reconcile them anyway. and hope you can sleep well. i will let you know tomorrow how it goes. right after i take a nap on my new mattress. my almost a fluffy cloud mattress....